He hesitated for a while and said, "I don't know... quiet I guess?"
I think his response caused a full hard reboot of my cranial OS. It was the first time I'd ever met anyone whose relationship to music was so fundamentally different from mine.
I'd need to read through the article, but the Wikipedia link sounds they are conflating "enjoying" and "responding to". Instead, I'm assuming musical anhedonia is referring more to "apathy of sound".
I think it is unreasonable to assume that if someone were to say “well I prefer quiet, I guess,” they mean that they have some great emotional response to being in the quiet making them love it. It would be more reasonable to assume that they are basically indifferent and would rather not have the distraction/noise.
We are actually agreeing; however I'm saying that this is a preference. Wikipedia refers to anhedonia as an inability to have pleasure about something. However, valence [1] as a measurement identifies affect dimensions as a polar system - (to quote Wikipedia) "Stress is negative valence and opposite of this is pleasure or happiness." My claim is that "pleasure" can be positive or negative - in that music would cause happiness or stress. Adding genre only furthers my statement that you could claim someone is "R&B anhedonia", "death metal anhedonia", or "classical anhedonia" if anhedonia only refers to positive affects. I, however, am saying anhedonia should be for the positive and negative degrees of an affect.
"No sound" is still sound - its the difference between null and zero. My original post says I'd say anhedonia is more linked to "null", while preferring no sound is more linked to "zero". Holding a positive or negative preference is a measurable attribute and therefore not what I would claim anhedonia; however, being purely apathetic (void) of preference would.
I may not fall into this group. But, I suspect these people still have emotional responses to sounds loud enough to be causing dammage.
From the field of neuroscience, we know that music affects the brain like a drug of sorts. I believe Steven Pinker said in a book of his that music releases a "cocktail of neurotransmitters."
If for you, there's no value in that categorization, that's fine, of course.
I say music is "weird" because it doesn't fit into either of these categories of useful natural or constructed forms. People didn't first make music in order to feel good, but because that music made them feel good. They already had an instinctual response. It's more like those odd visual illusions that are due to the freaky things our brains do to correct for visual blind spots in our eyes: a species-specific thing largely without intrinsic survival value. Audio hallucinatory masterbation, essentially.
(Some things probably are evolutionarily driven. Percussion sounds a lot like a moving herd of animals being hunted. Makes sense this would dump adrenaline into your system to make you run faster and harder. But being moved to tears by a violin concerto or lost in ecstasy at a rock concert is categorically something else.)
Anyway, to the point which started this sub-thread if someone asked me "what music do you like?" I'd interpret that question as "what kinds of things do you like to listen to?" since in my experience that's what most people mean by the question. And indeed, I have noise cancelling headphones I don't even bother plugging into my computer because "silence" is what I prefer to listen to when working, thinking, etc. If you get shocked by the answer.. that's the fault of you and your own assumptions. You asked; I answered: I prefer to NOT listen to music, thank you very much.
And turn the radio down, while you're at it.
I wouldn't say I'm fully unable to appreciate music. But... I dunno, I can get by without.
I know I have listened to a lot of enjoyable music and yet I go for long periods of time not seeking it, not thinking about it, and probably unable to list off things I used to listen to.
For instance, years ago, I was buying any CD with some sort of concerto grosso. These days I am listening to mostly streaming electronic music from the early 2000s. For a while I was listening to FM radio, but not enjoying it much.
I also at times have had a visual imagination connected to music and at other times not.
Anyway, anhedonia/apathy may not be total or one-dimensional, is my point.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3
- https://youtu.be/JTEFKFiXSx4
An anecdote: when my semiotics professor talked about this composition for the first time, I was recording the lecture, and when colleagues asked for a copy, I sent them only the pauses between the sentences. When art meets sarcasm, it spreads really fast.
In some people who experience it, it can be an absolutely overwhelming experience -- like strapping your brain to wings made out of lightning bolts.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson
2 - http://theconversation.com/why-do-only-some-people-get-skin-...
Yeah, the feelings along those lines are really really powerful...and slippery, they slide away as the frisson goes away. :(
In my case, there's sometimes feelings of "consciousness expansion", and "universal connection", similar to stories I've read from among various drug users or people who've experienced intense religious experiences -- at times I've felt intense focus, explosive creativity, and an "overclocked" sensation like my brain had been turned up to a faster performance ratio -- often for those moments of he frisson I can be intensely productive in creative pursuits. But it falls away as the frisson dissipates. I do not know if this is universal or not, there's pitifully little understanding of this phenomenon and sharing of information.
It's a very personal feeling, I don't know that I could ever do it with other people around, and it's tied to very specific passages of music that seem unique to the frissoner. As you can guess it's very addictive, and when I was younger I would spend hours auditioning albums looking for "frissonable" moments I would play over and over again for hours -- usually just a few seconds of some passage that would trigger it. However, pursuing this seems to "use-up" the feeling and after a while the passage would lose its triggering power.
If the universe was about to end, and I was allowed to have one final pleasurable experience replayed, selected from any orgasm of frisson I've ever had, I'd definitely pick from among my most intense frissons.
Certain classical moments are pretty reliable.
For example, the first few seconds of the Paganini variation here at around 23:00 minutes. https://youtu.be/c33q87s03h4?t=1375 except not this recording. I used to have a recording of it I inherited from my great grandfather and it was that specific recording that used to send me off.
The opening of Beethoven's 7th - 2nd movement (right until the main theme changes up until about 2:30) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgHxmAsINDk
Non-classical:
The main theme of this a about 1:07 https://youtu.be/YQJSnMvIKM4?t=68
Certain long notes in this song (kind of hard to explain, but certain notes she holds in sustenato): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FrWoVC6SZ8&list=PL91bz63WYu...
This William Ackerman song has some great passages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jles3aPfeI
Some moments in this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV9Ow4kOA4E
Asucultation by the Antidote used to be a favorite (it doesn't work anymore :() https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWs2R6W5vCc
Many of the pieces of Solar Fields' Movements album are fantastic but especially this song https://youtu.be/yQjove0nzss?t=1096
All I Need by Radiohead, especially the main bridge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LlfGrP4n6E
Mree's cover of Blood, something with her phrasing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMe_5O0mYj0
Several pieces by Steve Reich seem to hack the phenomenon for me and run just underneath the trigger: Six Pianos, Music for 18 Musicians, etc.
It can also depend on the context, some of the passages won't "work" without other surrounding song context...like the contrast of the triggering passages and the non-triggering is what sort of does it.
There's actually an entire subreddit dedicated to this, but I've not found much in other people's music that kicks it off. https://www.reddit.com/r/frisson
It's an entirely different feeling of liking music or finding it pleasurable, for which I believe I'm fairly conventional.
On the other hand, I'm utterly unresponsive to poetry.
Childhood was very difficult, the few times I tried to explain it to me parents they thought I just found music very beautiful. It's very hard possessing something so great and never connecting with another person who can also experience it. It's like having a completely different sensory organ and describing what colors are to people who are blind from birth.
The internet has definitely helped me realize we're not alone with this thing!
(I also don't get much out of poetry and pretty much ignore lyrics in music)
I am reluctant to call it similar to an orgasm , because of the sexual connotations. While my body does not respond in a way similar to an orgasm, the "dopamine rush" (I am being liberal with the term) I get when listening to certain music is very similar.
I often have raised hair, tears in my eyes and a general lightheadedness and the biggest grin after such a moment.
First time I put it that way. Hoping it doesn't sound too creepy.
I found they had a DVD of Yes' Symphonic tour from around 2001, and I felt like a real idiot because my eyes were seriously watering up during a lot of that concert. It's not crying, although it may look the same.
I recall that when I was learning my first instrument, and started learning a lot of songs, a lot of the other instruments didn't really make sense. For instance, if I was learning a guitar part from a rock song, the bass/drums/keys sort of sounded like a background mix that I couldn't identify into their individual instruments/parts.
I've thought about taking up the guitar or piano since then, but haven't ever gotten around to it.
Funny you should say that - I've been slowly trying to learn guitar for a couple of months now. I picked up a ukulele last week on a whim and can't seem to put it down! It's simpler than a guitar, but there's still so much to learn: the chords themselves, of course, but also how chords are created and how that relates to the way the instrument is strung; strums/rhythm; fingerpicking; the way different types of strings change the character of the sound... it just goes on and on.
I'm not expert, but contact me if you want to chat sometime. My username is my real name, which is also my homepage's domain ( plus '.com') and my username on every social media service I use.
I still have a long ways to go, I can barely play basic chords properly
And by the way, since HN talked about Anki a few days ago [0], this is a nice little fact which I just entered into my database. Copy&pasted the first line of the Wikipedia article and used the cloze mechanism the ask for the term and its definition. Now I will never forget about musical anhedonia anymore.
In the second one, I felt pleasure looking at the pretty girls, but their singing did nothing for me.
I find myself distracted by the body language of the guy on the left (and later the one to the right). It is more interesting to me to watch how people behave than to listen to the music.
The second one does nothing for me - it's just dull.
Can you explain how you feel when you listen to those songs?
The second one has a bit of a story behind it; the girls on stage are singing their hit song they wrote about Emmylou Harris, who is a famous singer herself and is in the audience. They talk about how she inspired them to sing so it's cool they have the opportunity to play for her. The song is very sorrowful sounding but pleasant and beautifully sung so it brings tears to my eyes.
Thanks for this, it's very interesting. I've realised that I don't really rank music in that way - I don't have favourite songs, in the same way as I have favourite books, movies etc.
> The second one has a bit of a story behind it; the girls on stage are singing their hit song they wrote about Emmylou Harris, who is a famous singer herself and is in the audience. They talk about how she inspired them to sing so it's cool they have the opportunity to play for her.
The story is cool, you're right. I understand how it would be emotional to those involved, but I found the description of the story conveyed the emotions involved more than the singing did.
> The song is very sorrowful sounding but pleasant and beautifully sung so it brings tears to my eyes.
It's well sung, but I don't find it technically impressive like the guitar playing. Perhaps because, day-to-day, we are exposed to many good vocalists but very few guitar solos?
Really it was just that, noise.
Do you find it harder to enjoy movies?
Typically the score does so much _work_ in the name of emotional manipulation, that I wonder if it would make movies less enjoyable.
More specifically I wonder if you would like certain movies (Spielberg) less and other movies (Er, Um. Who doesn't use scores that much?) more?
I don't like "music movies" such as High Fidelity, 8 Mile, School of Rock, Blues Brothers. They are just average comedy/drama flicks for me. Maybe normal people like them more?
For a while if someone asked me what music I like, I replied film music. I do enjoy film music but maybe just because the music makes me remember the movie?
I'm definitely affected by the music. Maybe music can still emphasize emotions for a musical anhedonic and it just that music in itself does not do much?
For a similar reason, when choosing music to listen to, I generally listen to the same songs again and again - those which have a connection to my past. It is very hard to feel anything about a new piece of music.
This means that I may regularly listen to one track by a particular artist, but have no interest in any of their other songs. I don't even like listening to remixed or live versions of songs that I enjoy - they are sufficiently different that they do not evoke any memories and hence are uninteresting to me.
You know, I also don't dream. I wonder if there is a name for never dreaming and if there is any link between not dreaming and not having an emotional response to music.
Quite possibly. I do enjoy watching a movie on occasion, but there are many other things I would rather do with my time. It turns out that compared to most people, I don't watch many movies - I've seen well under 100 of the "IMDb Top 1000 Movies of All Time" [1].
I've never considered this to be related to music, but I guess it could be.
[1] https://www.listchallenges.com/top-1000-greatest-movies-of-a...
If you were enjoying it then how would it differ from any of the other variety of things you already enjoy that you spend money on?
How is that different than letting reflections of light off of objects control your emotional state? Do you also have no emotional reaction to art, or even as simple as preferring a certain color?
Would painting a room bright pink be no different to you than painting it black? Does looking at roadkill or a corpse feel absolutely no different to you than viewing something most would consider calming like a sunset, flowers or someone who you consider to be beautiful? If you do feel different, then yes, light reflecting off of objects does create an emotional reaction to you.
There's actually quite a lot of this: it takes some people a surprisingly long time to realize that they can't smell things the way everyone else can ('anosmia'), or that they don't see the same colors.
I sometimes wonder what people with pain asymbolia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_asymbolia) or aboulia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboulia) make of the rest of us talking abut pain and wanting things.
Some links: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi... http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11554894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10148792
Also, while I'm at it: when your nose is stuffy but which nostril it is seems to cycle over the course of the day, you're not imagining it and that's called the 'nasal dilation cycle' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle ; those things you see crossing your vision are also real and part of your eye fluid, called 'floaters' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater ; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination is probably self-explanatory.
That's exactly what's happening to me right now! I always just kind of assumed people were just using overly flowery speech to describe music! I remember one time in high school a kid who was way into music got really mad at me when I said I didn't really like music much. He said that I didn't seem much more than a sack of meat if I couldn't enjoy music.
> it takes some people a surprisingly long time to realize that they can't smell things the way everyone else can ('anosmia'), or that they don't see the same colors.
I've known I had a color vision deficiency since I was really young, but it isn't very strong so I don't run into trouble much. I only really got a strong example (outside of a purpose-built color vision test type thing) recently while playing Dwarf Fortress. Dwarf Fortress has a world map which represents volcanos as little red "^" marks. I was generating worlds repeatedly looking for a volcano near some grasslands. I was getting frustrated because I'd look at a map and wouldn't see anything. But after staring at the grassy areas for a while, I'd slowly start to see them. There were usually quite a few volcanos actually, it just was hard for me to find them. I was kind of confused as to why I wasn't seeing them easily before it hit me that the grassland is shown as green characters.
I tried showing a map to my sibling and my partner, both of whom have normal color vision. They both found all the volcanos immediately with no issues. It was wild!
Fortunately, Dwarf Fortress lets you customize all the colors used by the game. I should be able to make a higher contrast color palette for myself in the future.
Yes! I realised this a few years ago. When people say "that's a sad song", they really mean that the song makes them sad in and of itself.
Whereas, for me, the only way a song can make me sad is if it brings back sad memories - i.e. if I had previously heard the same song on a sad occasion.
Interestingly I'm also clinically tone-deaf, meaning that I'm utterly unable to tell what note is played or make anything resembling song with my voice. Don't invite me to karaoke. I cannot tell that the pitch of my voice doesn't match the song accompanying it.
But don't feel any pity: you guys are the weird ones :P
The idea that something I find so pleasurable does absolutely nothing to some people is really interesting to me.
If it helps, I REALLY like to dance and have alright rhythm, but I like the dancing not the music. Dancing without music is just as enjoyable to me, personally, but I understand that music hides a lot of the sounds my body makes and that makes it better. Something about the swaying is fun to me: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/opinion/slomo.html
It's not just the sound itself though, there's also something about a good riff or a well-written chorus. I don't get music that's too free-form, like improvisational jazz or stuff with way too many tempo changes. There has got to be a groove, a rhythm, a flow, a drive and a connection between the instruments, so they're playing together, to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
There is obviously also something to be said for emotional connections to specific songs or passages. As an example just off the top of my head, I read The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck as they were published when I was 7-9 years old, they were part of my formative years, as you might say.
So when I listen to Tuomas Holopainen's 2014 concept album Music Inspired by the Life and Times of Scrooge, it just touches something in me, I get all emotional and well up, especially at this song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWwSVOo5K_k
I obviously don't expect other people to have quite the same reaction, but to me, aside from being a hauntingly beautiful piece of music, it also tugs deeply at my childhood nostalgia, and elevates the music to a whole new level for me.
I, in turn, find this somewhat astonishing. Not only is it so different from my own experience, it's difficult to understand.
When you're enjoying a piece of music, you can at least imagine what it would be like not to feel anything. For me, though, when I see people enjoying music, it's so confusing. What am I "supposed" to be feeling?
edit: Can you guess what people might feel from this piece? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XWKq_kg2Ws
That's a difficult one. It didn't make me feel anything, so I really do have to guess what other people might feel.
For example, I have to think about occasions on which similar pieces of music are generally used. A solo piano like this piece is often sad, but on the other hand, this piece has a higher tempo than most sad songs.
The inevitable trend in pop music to becoming simpler and simpler and more homogenized to me is a symptom of the de-evolution of people's taste in music (on average) because they are not exposed to more sophisticated music, so they never develop a taste for it.
I think it's probably similar to how spelling and grammar seem to get worse every year, corresponding with the decline of reading actual books. But that may be just because I suffer from terminal Grammar Naziism and my sensitivity to it increases overtime.